


In The Walls

by yosgay



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), spooky houses are spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:41:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22368106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosgay/pseuds/yosgay
Summary: Sun behind clouds, clouds behind crumbling walls; in this manor, everything’s a shadow.It’s a lucky thing, then, that Emily’s grown used to those.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	In The Walls

**Author's Note:**

> mixed up in a violent world,  
> you were thrown to the wolves;  
> from my hands, you start to slip—  
> i did everything i [could](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRoAjBS5sF8).
> 
> (this was my piece for [stealth and simulation](https://twitter.com/dhpreyzine)!)

The air around the manor creeps beneath the skin. 

Damp and heavy, it fills up your mouth thick as saliva, or blood after a good punch. Nothing goes down easy. Not a breath or a swallow, like a boot against her throat, a crush and a press with every strangled inhale. It’s a weakness that sends her searching for the stab wound, has her waiting to fall like her mother. But the drain is not oxygen, nor blood—though something just as inexorable. Wrung dry like a damp cloth, the magic in her veins dims to the weak glow of a dying match.

There’s no life in the courtyard, but her skin still prickles under some imposing gaze. Like she’s watched by the house itself—

 _(—do i know this place?)_

This place, holding secrets she’ll rip out of the walls if she has to, be it with magic or her bare hands. It stares and she stares back. Sun behind clouds, clouds behind crumbling walls; in this manor, everything’s a shadow. 

It’s a lucky thing, then, that Emily’s grown used to those. 

* * *

The smell crosses the threshold before she does. 

It’s all sick decay, reeking like a Dunwall fifteen years old, the city still overflowing with plague and death. _When no one keeps the rooms clean and dry, a house goes to rot..._ Her footsteps echo across half-collapsed stone floors and up decrepit stairs, adding to the quiet chorus of this house. The staccato tap of rats inside the walls. The lazy drone of a bloodfly crescendoing into the warning buzz of an agitated nest. There’s a maddening drip keeping beat behind it all, water leaking through the wrecked floors above—but there’s something else. Something pricking at the edge of her hearing, calling. Calling from below.

The heart pulses in her hand, stuttering out of sync with her own. Arrhythmic, synthetic and ringing nothing natural—but still alive in this house, and warm where _his_ magic has gone cold. A squeeze, a breath, and it’s that voice, that ghastly, disembodied whisper—

 _(—i ask nothing of you but to always remember who you are, and who you can be—)_

Too soft, too forgiving, picking into her skin like the splintering wood. That gentle voice does not belong in her hand, stained as it is. 

* * *

Down. 

In, further, swallowed, consumed. The heart pulses its lead, bidding her deeper into the mouth of the beast. Its teeth sink through to bone down every warped hallway, magic leaking out some unseen puncture wounds. She keeps her blade ready and close at hand, against nothing but rats. Nothing else here to wake but the ghosts. Until through the floor it comes, the monster’s growl—or maybe just a voice.

 _Could that be Stilton?_

Vomited out at the end of the hallway is a room more wrecked than all the others. Glass and porcelain crunches underfoot, remnants of the life he built. The floorboards split into a yawning fissure, rifts branching off to climb the walls. Vines grow among the cracks, living and dead intertwined, one making room for another.

She slips through the opening and lands silent below, poised for a fight. But there, slumped over the piano and muttering his nonsense, sits what’s left of Aramis Stilton. The smell of him comes through strong enough to stagger. He’s rotting along with this house. One more splintered floor, cracks in the stone widening the cracks in his mind.

And before her lips form around the question _he_ is there in answer, like a gust of wind off the sea. The air, _his_ air, crackles and shifts as the world around them stops, glowing electric and reeking of white hot whale oil. _“A sort of timepiece,”_ _he_ says, voice an echo, like many speak with _him_ , but not all agree. 

_(—there are no stars in the sky here, there is no sky—)_

The metal freezes her hand. A flick of her wrist and the piece fans out like a card trick, the illusion a window to polish and shine. Staring transfixed into its lens, watching a play three years old, she’s long past disbelief of the impossible. She doesn’t have to turn around to know when _he’s_ gone. The poisoned air settles like nightfall, time around her resuming it’s flow like a moonlit river.

Stilton’s calcifying bones reanimate. The discordant hammering of keys long since out of tune punctuates the madness of his ramblings, both incoherent, both so deeply broken. She leaves him behind before she can unfold her sword and put them both at peace. 

* * *

The piece has a pulse of its own. Emily's eyes flutter closed, a hand to her mouth to stave off the nausea when it works. It’s like she’s dropped off a building with no sinewy reach to grab the next ledge, flipped around until the world warps, unrecognizable. And the glare, it could be the sun, could be— _by the Void…_ Measured in blinks, the house rights itself before her bit by bit and in vivid color, rearranging into something sinisterly familiar. In place of the crumbling corridor is somewhere much more like home—along with two guards, shouting their disbelief a second before they draw their swords. 

This time, she doesn’t blink.

Of all her father taught in their lessons, he never told her that blood has a smell so strong it worms behind your eyes until your head aches. Or the way it spreads out thick as oil and browns to tar. He left out the spasms when life leaves the body, every muscle fighting to hold onto breath when it’s leaking out a slit throat. No one could have warned her that she’d mourn for every life she’s claimed—

_(—honorable intentions and well made plans, all drowning in the blood you’ve spilled—)_

No guide came with _his_ mark on living with so many souls swirling around your own, dragging you down like millstones, drowning you in their whispers.

All she sees are their eyes when she closes hers. As the gold wallpaper sprays red, she wonders how her father can sleep. 

She’ll be able to ask him soon enough.

A shake of the head and her hand flexes on some misplaced impulse, bracing for a burn that won’t spark here. The sharp black lines sit still in her skin. Below the signet ring adorning her finger, the symbol stands stark—obscene. With no magic it’s _his_ brand, a Mark of ownership that brings with it a wave of—

_(—this place is home to cutthroats and villains, are you not becoming one of them?)_

She wipes the blood from her blade. Leaves two more bodies behind. And further into this lavish, vile house, a different beast, but with teeth just as sharp—something else begins to smolder. 

Stilton, the Duke and his wicked friends, and **_her_** —for what they did here, this house deserves the rot it wears in her time. And **_she_ ** deserves to slither the streets and starve with the rats. Maybe Emily does as well, penance for this lecherous life she, too, has lived. She can look back on the spoils of her rule like the lens of the timepiece—the _Outsider_ didn’t give her a window. _He_ gave her a mirror.

_(—it is not too late for you, my love—)_

Everything she was, what she’s become—has it been worth it? Does she deserve the Empire she lost? Not now. No.

But maybe there’s still time to wash her hands. 

**Author's Note:**

> luv me a high chaos emily... thank u for reading :)


End file.
